Short video operation: content positioning and hot spot operation skills

I believe all operators have more or less some understanding of Douyin's traffic distribution mechanism. So, how do we make relevant videos when tracking some hot events?

1. The recommendation logic of Tik Tok videos

After the video is released, it will be put into the initial traffic pool. In the initial traffic pool, the system will recommend 0 to 250 people to watch your video.

In the initial traffic pool, if users think your video content is good, and the likes, comments, collections, and video completion rates all meet the criteria for secondary recommendation, then this video can receive secondary recommendations from Douyin and enter the second traffic pool. The system will recommend 500 to 5,000 people to watch your video.

By analogy, the video will continue to enter the larger third traffic pool, the fourth traffic pool... and so on.

This process will continue until the likes, comments, collections and video completion rates of your video do not meet the criteria for entering the next traffic pool. Videos with millions or tens of millions of views have gone through countless traffic pools before achieving the effect of being a hit. Generally speaking, the recommended period for a traffic pool is 24 hours to 7 days.

After an author publishes a video, the Tik Tok platform will give the video initial traffic based on the content quality of the video, the number of fans of the creator, and user preferences.

The initial traffic consists of two parts: pushing the video to the fans of the content creator and pushing the video to users who may like the video through algorithm calculation. The platform will not distribute the video to all fans who follow this account. Only about 10% of the fans can see the push of this video.
The quality of the video is evaluated using the following dimensions:

Completion rate: The completion rate refers to the ratio of the number of users who watch the entire video to the number of views. Users watching the entire video means that the user likes the video. It contains not only the user's first viewing data, but also the user's repeated viewing data.

Like rate: Like rate refers to the ratio of the number of likes of users to the number of views. Likes come from users' recognition and reward for content, so the higher the like rate, the more popular the video is among users.

Comment rate: Comment rate refers to the ratio of the number of user comments to the number of views. Videos commented on by users mean that users approve of the video. The comment rate includes not only the number of user comments, but also the number of comments viewed and the number of comment likes.

Forwarding rate: The forwarding rate refers to the ratio of the number of videos forwarded by users to the number of views. When a user proactively forwards a video, it must be an action based on liking the video, so it can be used as an indicator to measure the quality of the video.

New followers: New followers refer to the number of followers that increase after an account releases a new video. After watching a video, a user follows an account, which indicates that the user likes the video and the account.

Home page views: Home page views refer to the number of users who enter the account home page through the work. Users enter the account homepage because they are attracted by the video and want to watch more similar videos, so they enter the account homepage to look for them. The new views of other works of the account can be calculated into the score of this video.

Tag system: It filters out keywords of the video through video content or text content, helps the system describe and classify content, and facilitates retrieval and distribution to people with the same tags.

In other words, there are one or more labels behind each video content; not only the video has labels, but the video viewers will also be labeled by Douyin. For example, if a user recently likes to watch beauties and travel, then his labels will be beauties and travel.

Tik Tok will combine the two tags to push videos. That is, when your video tag is travel, your video will be pushed to users whose tag is travel, using the tag recommendation mechanism to acquire accurate customers.

Places where you can put labels:

• Label the cover
• Tagging
• Content tagging
• Sound Tagging
• Nickname tagging
• Signature label

Universal formula for tags: regional keywords + precise keywords + expanded keywords = keywords for your precise potential customers

By studying the traffic distribution rules of the Douyin platform clearly, you can prescribe the right remedy and optimize every aspect of the account and content. If you persist in doing so for a long time, you will definitely gain considerable increases in fans and video views. Of course, even if you understand the rules of the platform, you cannot ignore the quality of the content itself. Studying platform rules is just a skill to apply flexibly; the content itself is the core.

2. Account Content Positioning

Content positioning refers to clarifying the boundaries of your content. You need to know what you can write and what you cannot write, how to write the content that can be written, and what form and logic should be used? Why can’t we write content that cannot be written? Is it because it is inconsistent with user positioning and channel requirements? How can we transform it into something that can be written and integrate it?

Then you need to label your content with some kind of stylized label so that users can associate your content and products with it when they see or come into contact with similar things and information. This is the characteristic, which can also be called positioning and tonality.

The tone of content is the soul of the content. Content without soul is unlikely to be liked by users. Content tonality refers to designing a style that is acceptable and liked by users based on the positioning of the content, and maintaining and using this style all the time. This section mainly discusses how to determine the tone of the content from the two dimensions of positioning and style. As shown in Figure 3-18, the content tonality formula.

Figure 3-18 Content tonality formula

1. Content positioning

Content positioning is divided into two parts: the first part is the positioning of the user group, and the second part is the positioning of the content direction.

2. User group positioning

Targeting refers to determining the target audience for your content. The output of all content is based on user needs. Only by clarifying who the target users are can we determine what the user needs are.

Around 2016, P2P financial services were extremely popular, and many apps set up financial content sections in an attempt to increase user stickiness. However, the content sections of most apps produce content purely for the sake of content, without considering what kind of user audience it is.

For example, some P2P apps produce a lot of general financial content, such as stock analysis, insurance analysis, financial management knowledge, bank interest rate analysis, etc. This is a typical case of not understanding user needs and usage scenarios, and thinking that as long as there is content, there will be reading and user stickiness.

P2P is a low-frequency money fund product and is only a small branch of the financial management industry. Relatively professional users rarely invest in such products. Therefore, no matter how much general financial content there is, it will not increase users' reading interest.

3. Content orientation

Content direction positioning refers to what kind of content to write and in which direction to write. For example, beauty content, food content, etc. If the products you operate are content-based products, they can be broad and diverse. If the product you are operating is self-media or a smaller product, the content must be positioned and focused, and never be scattered.

Case Study:

Many girls have a dream of becoming an internet celebrity, so they often go to Xiaohongshu to write articles, for example, on beauty, clothing, etc. However, the content written by the girls has no focus and is very casual. Today they write about how to draw eyeliner, tomorrow they write about the experience of using Huaxizi, and the day after tomorrow they write about the clothing matching for professional women.

Such broad content positioning is equivalent to no positioning. Users will not remember what type of account it is after reading the article. The scope of the content should be narrowed down, focusing on a certain small category and making it more refined and in-depth. For example, you can only generate content for professional women's attire. After a period of accumulation, users will associate the account with women's professional attire.

4. Content style

Style is a concept in the field of art, which refers to the overall appearance of a work of art, or the inherent characteristics expressed through a work of art. This concept also applies to content. To put it simply, it means using a sentence or a few words to describe the content.

Case Study:

Douban is a community with a literary and artistic style, which is Douban's style. If we use a few words to summarize this style, we will think of pure, thoughtful, real, and noble. These words are the concrete and labeled embodiment of Douban's content style.

Readers can try to recall why they go to Douban to read movie reviews? Is it because Douban film reviews are pure, real, thoughtful, profound, and free of the smell of money?

Through the above cases, we can get the definition formula of content style, as shown in Figure 3-18.

Figure 3-18 Content style definition formula

5. A personality

A character refers to the characteristics that appear when the content is in a relatively stable state, for example, humorous content, exquisite content, etc. Personality is a form of personification. If the content continuously produced by an account is compared to a person, then the personality of this person is the personality of the content.

6. Extroverted traits

Extroverted traits refer to the outward and concrete manifestation of personality, which can be specific language patterns, specific typesetting patterns, or specific symbols, etc. For example, the external manifestations of humor are that the content often contains jokes, the illustrations are vivid and interesting, and the pictures are designed in series.

3. Operational hot events

It is mainly divided into two ways: planning and operation.

Planning hot events means communicating with users in advance and formulating hype plans. For example, detailed wedding live broadcasts, film and television drama press conferences, live talk shows, etc., the main forms are similar to the TV and Internet interactions and celebrity fan groups on Weibo.

Operational hot events refer to sudden hot events in operations. For example, Wang Baoqiang’s divorce, Wen Zhang’s Until Monday, Peter Ho’s 8:20 Post, and Wu Xiubo’s cheating incident.

1. Produce high-quality content

Hot events are hard to come by and have a strong news nature, so they are destined to be very timely. High-quality content has less timeliness and tends to be more knowledge-based.

For example, funny jokes on Weibo, curious videos, military analysis articles, archaeological topics, astronomy topics, etc. The core idea of ​​improving user stickiness is to accumulate a large amount of high-quality content that is not time-sensitive.

2. Control culture and set the pace

There are many talented people among the users, and many of them are good at discovering the other side of the content from a curious perspective, such as interesting comments and in-depth analysis. During the operation process, it is necessary to make good use of this group of users, let them play a role in setting the pace, and then slowly form a community culture.

For example, the cultural atmosphere of queuing, building buildings, and the second floor being the coolest in the comments.

Students who frequently use Toutiao should have discovered that the teasing culture that often appears in its comments includes "My brother's name is Shunliu", "Che Zhuzi", "Lu Han's acting skills", etc.

3. Sense of participation

If ordinary users just watch and do not participate in the interaction, the community product will definitely decline. Ways to increase user engagement are to filter content based on interest and diversify interactive functions.

Users will only have the desire to participate when they are faced with content that interests them. Therefore, interest recommendation and content mining mechanisms can be used to meet users' needs for screening content of interest. The main product strategies include topics, circles, super topics, hot searches, etc.

The purpose of diversifying interactive functions is to provide users with more ways to participate. Users' willingness to participate and forms of expression are different. Some users are willing to participate deeply while others are willing to participate shallowly.

For example, deeply engaged users like to post long articles, while shallowly engaged users like to simply forward them. The interactive functions mainly include forwarding, commenting, liking, voting, sharing, etc.

Author: Bai Gaoliang

Source: White Sorghum (LWXBGL)